Terror in Paris: Driver dead after ramming police van

There has been another attempted terror attack in Paris, the fifth one in the past four months. A driver rammed his car into a police vehicle on the Champs-Elysees. From Fox News:

The attacker died shortly after the incident, the French Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said. The attacker, a 31-year-old man, was badly burned after his car exploded when he deliberately crashed it into a police van. The police van caught fire, but it was quickly contained, officials said. The bomb squad was called to the scene.

Authorities discovered a gas tank and an AK-47 rife in the attacker’s car, Fox News confirmed. The man was from a suburb in Paris and had been previusly flagged for extremism, French police said.

ABC News posted this video on Twitter which appears to show the car billowing smoke after the attack. Police run to the car with fire extinguishers:

This is the 5th terror attack in Paris in the past four months. A man with a machete attacked soldiers at the Louvre in February. In March a man who said he wanted to “die in the name of Allah” held a female soldier at gunpoint before being shot. In April a French policeman was shot and killed on the Champs-Elysees. And in May a man with a hammer attacked a police officer at Notre Dame cathedral.

A Brazilian couple with son in stroller and grandmother couldn’t understand why they were blocked at the Grand Palais exhibition hall and barred from accessing the Champs-Elysees, where they had walked freely earlier in the day.

They were visibly shocked when informed.

“I’ll go back to my hotel now,” said Alexander Ferreira. He said they were in London shortly after the recent big attack there.

“It’s not safe now, not just in France but in Europe. No one place is safe in the world.”

Paris has been on heightened alert for terrorism since the November 2015 coordinated terror attack in Paris in which Islamic extremists killed 130 people. That attack followed the Charlie Hebdo attack which killed 12 in January 2015.